The Puffin Bowl: At least two years ago, a woman I work with said she had a really big tree in her backyard that she was going to call “the tree people” to cut down. She asked if I wanted any of the wood. (DUH!) I said yes and offered to help cut it up. Well, time went by, and kept going by, and weeks turned to months, months to over a year, and finally last fall she said the tree was on the ground. She thought it was a maple tree, but wasn’t sure, and that I could have as much as I wanted, because it was just going to be firewood. I had to excuse myself to wipe the drool off my chin…
When I got to her house, there was indeed a tree laying across her backyard. From the driveway, it looked like a big ‘ol tree. When I got close, I realized four things. First, this thing was massive! The blade on my chainsaw is 26″ and the base of the tree was about twice that wide. Second, it was not a maple tree, but a red oak tree. Having never turned red oak (only white oak) I figured this would be something new to try and quietly thanked the wood gods for my good fortune. Third, this tree had been completely abused by Mother Nature! The bottom 20 feet or so was rotted away about halfway through the width of the tree. It’s amazing that it was even standing and hadn’t decided to come down on it’s own. Over the years, the rotted part had allowed water to seep in, causing cracks and rot to move up the tree another 20 feet or so, so I was pretty sure most of the wood from the main trunk would be unusable for turning. Luckily, the limbs on this thing were thicker than most tree trunks, so there would be plenty of wood to cart home. The main thing that struck me, however, was that this tree had to have been old. Like over 100 years old, old. Not to sound like a granola-eating-hippie-tree-hugger, but it was actually kinda sad to see a tree that had been standing that long, had withstood so many storms, and had witnessed so much history, reduced to such an inglorious ending as becoming a bonfire. As we worked on the tree, Lisa, her husband Jeff, and one of their sons talked about their history with the tree. I heard about the tree house they built next to it, the way the kids played on and around it, the “things” the prior owners had done to it <insert ominous shudder here>… I felt like it was some distant cousin to their family was literally being cut out of the family tree. When that feeling passed, I grabbed as many pieces as would comfortably fit in the back of the Suburban and headed home to seal the ends until I could turn the logs into bowl blanks.
A couple weeks later, I took two of the bowl blanks to a friend’s house because my little lathe dosen’t have the oomph to spin that much wet, heavy, wood. When we started spinning the logs, it was so wet a mixture of water, sap, and general liquid ickiness was literally flying out of the wood, soaking my shirt and leaving trails across his shop ceiling. It also smelled bad. No, it stank! Bad! Like worse than a closing time at the daycare nursery after all the babies had spent the day suffering from some kind of intestinal virus kind of bad. I came home with an immediate need for a washing machine and a shower, but I had two roughed out bowls, both about 14″ across and a good 7-8 inches high. I sealed the wood again and left them to dry.
Late last month, when I checked up on them, I noticed HUGE cracks had formed in them while they dried. A couple years ago, i would have accepted the loss and thrown them into the burn pile, but these days I’m not so willing to give up. I got the bright idea of filling the cracks with gold colored epoxy, thinking it would seal the cracks, glue the wood back together and looks like some kind of exotic sap had been captured in the wood. Visions of Jurassic Park mosquitoes frozen in chunks of amber was the look I would go for.
Reality is a harsh master!
Filling cracks on a round object is next to impossible! I had to mix up tiny amounts of epoxy, then somehow get it into the cracks without leaking all over the place, then let it dry overnight before moving on to the next crack. Oh, and epoxy forms air bubbles if you do it wrong, and if there were bubbles in the dried epoxy the next morning, the epoxy had to be carved out so another layer could be added to fill the bubbles, which meant another day of waiting. When I was finished with all the epoxy work, I took the now sealed bowl back to Bob’s for final turning and prepared myself to gloat over how good the gold would look as it started to shine through the cracks and accept the heartfelt praise and awe that Bob would be powerless to withhold.
Yeah… Well… That didn’t happen!
Only two of the cracks were wide enough to allow for all the gold metallic coloring mixed into the epoxy to actually look like shiny gold, and there were still air bubbles that could be seen. To salvage the project, Bob had some red oak colored wood putty, which we used to cover over most of the cracks and bad epoxy. We also uncovered another issue with the bowl. As we removed wood from the inside of the bowl, and small brown line in the wood started getting bigger and bigger. By the time we got the bowl down to its final thickness, we were staring at an irregular shaped hole in the bowl about the size of a pencil eraser where many, many years ago a little piece of tree limb had started to grow, then rotted away, leaving a void. Bob said it looked like a duck, I thought it was a spot on vision of a puffin. We filled that hole with CA glue and bright blue chalk to add contrast, then re-finished the sanding.
Below if what we came up with. I gave it to Lisa today, since I had promised her something from the wood that I took and she absolutely loved it. Made me smile, knowing that piece of the old tree will have a much better ending than a bonfire!
